How Ubisoft kept the lid on Assassin’s Creed III‘s biggest spoiler

Or: How to get hundreds of people to keep a major gameplay secret for two years.

Note: It should go without saying, but this article contains major spoilers for plot and gameplay points that happen in the first half of Assassin's Creed III. Read at your own risk.

"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." So said Ben Franklin, and it's a particularly apt quote for the game industry. Not that it tries that hard to keep many secrets—the modern game marketing machine controls a slow and steady drip of information about the biggest titles that can start years before release. It's gotten to the point that an avid gaming news reader can know practically everything there is to know about a game months before it comes out. And even when a publisher wants to keep some information to itself, journalists will leak any surprises they can get their hands on—Kotaku's major Modern Warfare 3 leak last year is a prime example.

I figured I had a pretty good handle on what to expect from Assassin's Creed III before I got my hands on a review copy. After playing the game briefly behind closed doors at E3, and seeing plenty of hands-off demos at events like PAX, I knew I'd be controlling half-Mohawk assassin Connor as he fought off redcoats during the revolutionary war. So I was as surprised as anyone when the opening cut scene ended and I was instead in control of a proper British gentleman named Haytham, who seemed to have all the requisite assassin's skills. Through over two years of development and months of non-stop marketing, a team of over 200 developers inside Ubisoft had somehow managed to keep one of the biggest twists in gaming history from leaking out to the public.

"Believe me, I'm surprised, because it feels like nothing is ever kept secret and things always winds up leaking," Assassin's Creed 3 lead scriptwriter Corey May told Ars Technica. "It was very hard to keep it a secret. Fortunately I work with amazing people who were willing to do it."

That includes the Ubisoft marketing department, who May says were surprisingly OK not listing "multiple protagonists" on the standard bullet-point list of Assassin's Creed III features before the game's release. That's despite the easy marketability of what May called Haytham's "debonair flair [as] sort of a colonial James Bond, in a way."

May says he didn't even discuss the big reveal with his closest friends or family—he just "couldn't take the risk." While he could talk about Haytham with other members of the development team, that didn't really relieve the stress. "All we would end up doing was riling ourselves up. We were on this thing, and we were all having the same fears and anxious nervous anticipation. That didn't make it any easier."

Shhhhhhhhhh...

Keeping such a huge secret amongst a group of hundreds of developers was only possible, May said, because the entire team "believed in the idea of saving the surprise. Most of the people who work on games are themselves gamers and can appreciate coming into something fresh and unspoiled. People on the team try, and often fail miserably, not to spoil themselves too much, so if you have people who are working on sections of the game themselves that don't require them to watch the cut scenes, they'll skip through them during production so they can keep it fresh for their first play through. I think it was a combination of people being gamers and just respect for the audience in general."

That doesn't mean there weren't points where the beans almost got spilled. "We had close calls every now and then, or what I thought were close calls," May recalls. "We'd have press events and we would have versions of the game and I would get nervous. What if someone selects the wrong thing and starts wondering 'Who is this person?'"

Outside of gameplay events, there were more close calls. At one point during the development, a novelization that prominently featured Haytham leaked out briefly, but was quickly squashed before anyone asked too many questions. Then, just weeks before the game, Kotaku posted a leaked third-party video showing the first 20 minutes of the game, though Ubisoft PR got them to take it down before details spread very far.

Even when early review copies went out to dozens of outlets (under a strict embargo, of course), there was nary a stray tweet revealing the secret (though of course many release day reviews mentioned it, often with prominent spoiler warnings). "There were fears, but I also suspected that if it was new and a surprise for the reviewer, they would want to keep it as a surprise as well," May said. "I crossed my fingers that they would keep the surprise but that was really the extent of it."

The value of surprise

Despite these close calls and potential leak points, May says he thinks a lot of potential players deliberately avert their eyes from this kind of thing. "There's always been a strange back and forth to me, especially amongst our hardcore fans," he said. "They always want to know everything, but then when they find out things too soon, they become upset that they've been spoiled, so there's this weird desire to know but this regret or guilt after you know. I've watched that every now and then on the boards because I find it really fascinating. ... In my mind there is something special about encountering something unexpected, something you haven't been told about, and that experience isn't quite the same if you're going into the game knowing it's going to be there."

At the same time, May said he understands there's a certain appeal to wanting to find out about an upcoming game as early as possible, a phenomenon he's experienced personally. "I remember doing the same thing when I was younger around the release of Ultima VII. We barely had the Internet, but we had Prodigy and AOL boards, and every now and then little bits of information would slip out, and I was always so tempted, do I want to read this, do I want to know, or do I want to wait and stay fresh. There's sometimes a desire to have the information ahead of time and brag about it."

More than his early experience with Internet spoilers, though, May said he was inspired by the masterful bait-and-switch pulled off by Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2 (Warning: Additional spoilers for an 11-year-old game coming). Konami promoted that game for months with beautiful trailers and a significant demo featuring Solid Snake, the hero of the first Metal Gear Solid. In the final release, though, players spent the last two-thirds or so of the game playing as Raiden, a whiny, inexperienced, somewhat effeminate agent that was practically the polar opposite of Snake. Fans were alternately disgusted, intrigued, or confused, depending on who you talk to.

May recalls playing MGS2 with a persistent belief that the action would eventually return to Snake after what he expected to be a short section with Raiden. "And then I see the end credits," he says. "That was a very important moment for me, it's something I still remember to this day. I love the game but I was very motivated to get back to Snake, and I felt very weird—not disappointed, just weird—when it was all of a sudden end credits."

Assassin's Creed III's switcheroo isn't quite that significant—Haytham is only playable for the first third or so of the game, though he's a major player in the story throughout. And while May said he'd ideally liked to have had one more Haytham sequence, he didn't want the surprise to overwhelm the core game. "I felt secure in keeping the secret in that the game itself wasn't different from the trailers, it's that there was this significant additional content that was being kept a secret, not that the actual premise or content of the game itself was different than what had been advertised," he said.

But having Haytham be playable was key to getting players to see him and his fellow templar recruits as human beings with believable motivations, not just as cartoonish supervillains. "To me, it was more interesting to try and let you truly spend time with them in a more organic and fun ways, whether it's being on a mission with them, or talking with them in a bar, or to build up the people that would become the antagonists," he said. "I wanted to show the templars are not that different from the assassins—they're not simply sitting around in a smoky back room plotting world domination because it was cool."

Oh, did I not mention that Haytham is actually an antagonistic templar, and not one of the assassins players have controlled throughout the series? The game doesn't mention it either until you've been gleefully killing people as Haytham for four or five hours. For May, keeping that twist a secret was at least as important as hiding Haytham from public view in the first place.

"At the end of the day, I would have been fine with news of Haytham leaking out," he said. "For me, personally and professionally, it was, 'Can I pull off the reveal that he's a templar?' ... I got a couple of messages from reviewers as they were reviewing the game saying, 'Nice,' so that gamble, at least in my mind, paid off."

While this is the first time May has been able to surprise his audience to this extent, he admitted that in the past he's floated the idea of outright lying to the audience in order to keep a secret. "I prefer not only to not be spoiled, but I would also be a fan of putting out disinformation," he said. "I remember a long time ago I was working on a Prince of Persia game, The Two Thrones. We knew the fans really wanted Farah to come back. What I wanted to do at time was have marketing take the stand 'No, she's not back, she's not going to be in the game,' so that when she showed up people were pleasantly surprised. I don't think [the marketing] people agreed with my idea to tell a lie."

It wouldn't have been the only time a developer actively lied to the press. Back in 2010, developer David Jaffe said in a May 24 interview that he was not working on a new Twisted Metal game, and that his company wouldn't even be at the next month's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Fast forward three weeks, and Jaffe and crew literally rolled in as surprise guests at Sony's press conference to show off a fully playable build of a new Twisted Metal game that had obviously been in development for quite a while.

For May, though, the strain of effectively lying to the world by omission was a nerve-wracking experience that he's not eager to experience again. "We knew Haytham existed for over two years now, and to have said from day one, 'We're going to work to keep this a secret,' it's there in the back of your head every day and it makes you a little crazy. I don't know if I have the mental energy to do something like that again. ... I'm glad that we managed to do it and that for the most part people have found it really interesting and fun [but] it was a massive undertaking and a lot of stress."

Promoted Comments

It seems to me, of any industry, the gaming one is ideal for Apple style marketing where you don't tell anyone anything until the day it ships worldwide.

Imagine how much hype there would be, if unbelievable mixed with believable rumours and screenshots of half-finished artwork leaked from valve for 3 years, and then they announce a launch event "we have something to show you".

Mix in teenager's willingness to make shit up and create fan artwork, it could be pretty epic.

After reading the article, I can't even tell what the secret was or why it matters. Can someone explain?

In Assassin's Creed you play as a modern-day character (Desmond) who revisits the lives of his ancestors via a device that unlocks "genetic memories". Desmond's ancestors are Assassins, who have waged a shadow war against the Templars since the Crusades that Desmond becomes involved in.

The secret reveal was that they had you play as a previously unannounced ancestor for a decent chunk of the game, and then revealed that he's a Templar rather than an Assassin and you've been working for the "enemy" through the entire memory sequences.

Hmm. Another reason to avoid UbiSoft games, I guess, if they're so bad that they have to keep such major details secret from those that might buy it... (seriously, if something can't survive "spoilers", be it a movie, TV show, book, or game, it can't be all that good)

That may be the single most illogical thing I have ever read in Ars Technica comments.

It didn't surprise me all that much (even the Templar reveal; something like that was heavily foreshadowed in Revelations). What did surprise me is that Ubi squandered an opportunity to have a female protagonist.

What I would like to have spoilered is how Ubi is doing these leaderboards.

Hmm. Another reason to avoid UbiSoft games, I guess, if they're so bad that they have to keep such major details secret from those that might buy it... (seriously, if something can't survive "spoilers", be it a movie, TV show, book, or game, it can't be all that good)

[Irony]

When I played Starwars Knights of the old Republic, the story would have been just fine if I knew that Revan was a Sith Lord from the get go,

Also, I for one wouldn't have minded at all Bruce Willis' character in the 6th Sense was a Ghost was a ghost from the beginning, or if I had known that Kevin Spacey was Keiser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

Nope, wouldn't have ruined otherwise extremely enjoyable storiest at all... not one bit

MGS2 flashback. *shudders* After the awesome intro level (which I had played 100 times in the demo), I'm suddenly not Snake. WTF? I followed that development pretty closely and never got a hint of that twist (though I think he was visible in one of the pre-release trailers). I did enter a self-imposed media blackout about two months before release (and didn't even read the manual either), so maybe I missed some details.

Haytham was actually one of my favorite characters in the game and I would have been quite happy to have played another section as him. He felt like a very well conceived character and certainly was one of the more relatable protagonists I've come across in a while.

It seems to me, of any industry, the gaming one is ideal for Apple style marketing where you don't tell anyone anything until the day it ships worldwide.

Imagine how much hype there would be, if unbelievable mixed with believable rumours and screenshots of half-finished artwork leaked from valve for 3 years, and then they announce a launch event "we have something to show you".

Mix in teenager's willingness to make shit up and create fan artwork, it could be pretty epic.

When I played Starwars Knights of the old Republic, the story would have been just fine if I knew that Revan was a Sith Lord from the get go,

Also, I for one wouldn't have minded at all Bruce Willis' character in the 6th Sense was a Ghost was a ghost from the beginning, or if I had known that Kevin Spacey was Keiser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

Nope, wouldn't have ruined otherwise extremely enjoyable storiest at all... not one bit

[/Irony]

So many spoilers! You've ruined my adulthood!

Honestly, even though I'm still on a strict no-Ubisoft embargo, I do applaud their ability to keep something like this under wraps. It's quite difficult in this age to keep anything of significance under the proverbial hat for long.

It seems to me, of any industry, the gaming one is ideal for Apple style marketing where you don't tell anyone anything until the day it ships worldwide.

Imagine how much hype there would be, if unbelievable mixed with believable rumours and screenshots of half-finished artwork leaked from valve for 3 years, and then they announce a launch event "we have something to show you".

Mix in teenager's willingness to make shit up and create fan artwork, it could be pretty epic.

never been the video games method, its give out hints as much as possible to have that game's name out and not be a "WTF is this?" item on a shelf. you only last a month on that shelf, better hope people have some background on you.

Apple (any hardware maker) wants you to buy their current and not think about the future.

I'd really like to get in to this game series, I played the first game and really enjoyed it. Then the always online DRM came out, and I'm still not quite over the irony, nor the "PC gamers are a bunch of pirates" complaints. I also remember the first game being really squirrely on keyboard+mouse, but I might be thinking of Thief 3, which I played around the time I played AC1.

These games sound really fun. Not quite Deus Ex fun, but I'd love to play them some day. I just can't justify giving money to Ubisoft, though, when I have yet to buy so many other games from companies I have never felt marginalized by.

Playing as Haytham did catch me off gaurd and I was rather surprised how long his sequences lasted, but I figured he was a templar during the meeting that sent him to the colonies. The dialogue there and for the rest of his sequences was constructed too carefully to avoid mentioning templars and assassins, instead using phrases like 'our cause' and 'our enemies.'

To be honest, I was more than a little exasperated with the charade by the time the reveal came.

The only thing that threw me off, and still strikes me as odd, is the mission where Haytham and the templars infiltrate the fort of the slave-trading ex-templar. When calling in support during that mission, your templar buddies are portrayed on the minimap by the assassins' symbol.

But I think a whole game of playing as a templar could be interesting. Either from the point of view of Abstergo searching their own history or the assassins trying to know their enemy better.

The character you start as is not Connor, the Assassin in all the prelrease media. It's not so much a spoiler as it is a nice surprise. No, in this particular instance the story would not have been harmed in any way if Haytham was revealed ahead of launch (and another non-spoiler: Haytham's last name is Kenway.), but it was just... a nice surprise.

It didn't surprise me all that much (even the Templar reveal; something like that was heavily foreshadowed in Revelations). What did surprise me is that Ubi squandered an opportunity to have a female protagonist.

What I would like to have spoilered is how Ubi is doing these leaderboards.

Perhaps Liberations doesn't count as an Assassin's Creed title with a female protagonist?

I'd really like to get in to this game series, I played the first game and really enjoyed it. Then the always online DRM came out, and I'm still not quite over the irony, nor the "PC gamers are a bunch of pirates" complaints. I also remember the first game being really squirrely on keyboard+mouse, but I might be thinking of Thief 3, which I played around the time I played AC1.

These games sound really fun. Not quite Deus Ex fun, but I'd love to play them some day. I just can't justify giving money to Ubisoft, though, when I have yet to buy so many other games from companies I have never felt marginalized by.

While Assassin's Creed 3 may still change my mine (Currently about 40% through the game), AC2 is one of the best games I have ever played. It was leaps and bounds better than AC1. AC2:Brotherhood and AC2:Revelations were nice additions that tweaked on the AC2 mechanics and added some stuff.

AC3 however is an entirely new beast and they've relieved you of some control mechanics. Whether those control mechanics needed a 5 hour tutorial is debatable, but it is much smoother to play, just slightly hard to get used to right after playing one of the previous titles.

Wait--so something revealed in the opening cut scene is a major spoiler? Really?

You play as this character for 5 sequences, then you get a major reveal that he is a templar. So the shock from Desmond and yourself that you have been playing through as a templar for this long already is a shock and I imagine was very difficult to keep from the rest of the public.

Same here. I was wrongly relieved of my suspicions about Hathym's allegiances when the Assassin Symbol appeared over allies in the sequence in which Hathym drives the carriage under cover, only to find out later that those allies must have been Templars. I was actually a bit annoyed at that specious UI choice.

After reading the article, I can't even tell what the secret was or why it matters. Can someone explain?

In Assassin's Creed you play as a modern-day character (Desmond) who revisits the lives of his ancestors via a device that unlocks "genetic memories". Desmond's ancestors are Assassins, who have waged a shadow war against the Templars since the Crusades that Desmond becomes involved in.

The secret reveal was that they had you play as a previously unannounced ancestor for a decent chunk of the game, and then revealed that he's a Templar rather than an Assassin and you've been working for the "enemy" through the entire memory sequences.

It seems to me, of any industry, the gaming one is ideal for Apple style marketing where you don't tell anyone anything until the day it ships worldwide.

Imagine how much hype there would be, if unbelievable mixed with believable rumours and screenshots of half-finished artwork leaked from valve for 3 years, and then they announce a launch event "we have something to show you".

Mix in teenager's willingness to make shit up and create fan artwork, it could be pretty epic.

I half suspect Valve is going for exactly that. They have been extremely mum about what, if anything, they are doing for Episode 3. AFAIK, they've never even explicitly confirmed they are working on it at all (which, of course, makes all the speculation and outrage over their "delay" all that much more amusing, because they've done basically the exact opposite of what DNF did).

After reading the article, I can't even tell what the secret was or why it matters. Can someone explain?

In Assassin's Creed you play as a modern-day character (Desmond) who revisits the lives of his ancestors via a device that unlocks "genetic memories". Desmond's ancestors are Assassins, who have waged a shadow war against the Templars since the Crusades that Desmond becomes involved in.

The secret reveal was that they had you play as a previously unannounced ancestor for a decent chunk of the game, and then revealed that he's a Templar rather than an Assassin and you've been working for the "enemy" through the entire memory sequences.

What is good about this particular secret was that, while you are saying "WTF" in real life, the characters in the game are like "Did you see that?

After reading the article, I can't even tell what the secret was or why it matters. Can someone explain?

In Assassin's Creed you play as a modern-day character (Desmond) who revisits the lives of his ancestors via a device that unlocks "genetic memories". Desmond's ancestors are Assassins, who have waged a shadow war against the Templars since the Crusades that Desmond becomes involved in.

The secret reveal was that they had you play as a previously unannounced ancestor for a decent chunk of the game, and then revealed that he's a Templar rather than an Assassin and you've been working for the "enemy" through the entire memory sequences.

This gets a little crazier when you realize that Desmond is probably actually descended from Haytham. Which has some pretty substantial connotations in that he has ancestors in both secret societies.

After reading the article, I can't even tell what the secret was or why it matters. Can someone explain?

In Assassin's Creed you play as a modern-day character (Desmond) who revisits the lives of his ancestors via a device that unlocks "genetic memories". Desmond's ancestors are Assassins, who have waged a shadow war against the Templars since the Crusades that Desmond becomes involved in.

The secret reveal was that they had you play as a previously unannounced ancestor for a decent chunk of the game, and then revealed that he's a Templar rather than an Assassin and you've been working for the "enemy" through the entire memory sequences.

On a general note, spoiling of major plot twists has become so common in the gaming media, that I stopped reading any advertising or preview of any game I might be interested in a long time ago.

Nowadays I even fast forward comments on sites as Ars as soon as the name of new game I'm interested in gets mentioned. Most of internet folks are aware that no one appreciates a major spoiler but also most people don't care to give away the small things. It's quite hard but it pays off for me. I will never forget the big surprise I faced in Mass Effect 2 when

Spoiler: show

the Normady got destroyed and Shepard died in the opening sequence

. I'm quite sure that spoiler has been thoroughly leaked before the game came out.

I understand that The Hype is a major marketing instrument and information has to trickle down to spur the hype, but I think it is a good sign that developers and publishers also recognize the need for surprise.

I for one will try as hard as possible to get a completely unspoiled experience for my first playthrough. Gives me also good incentive for a second playthrough after I researched all the small things and easter eggs I (most surely) have missed the first time around.

This gets a little crazier when you realize that Desmond is probably actually descended from Haytham. Which has some pretty substantial connotations in that he has ancestors in both secret societies.

Maybe that's why Desmond is the One. Although given the Cross situation, I suspect there has been quite a bit of defection and inter-breeding between the factions over the centuries.

This still doesn't make the Desmond sequences any more enjoyable to play, particularly in the prior AC games. I always feel like he's the obligatory commercial break that occurs just when you start enjoying the show you were watching.

I'm quite sure that spoiler has been thoroughly leaked before the game came out.

I'm pretty sure that "Shepard's dead" was revealed very early on, though they didn't say exactly how it would play out. That's impressive that you didn't know.

I wish I could go back and play Planescape: Torment and KOTOR 1 without prior memories. Those two games really blew me away the firs time.

That's something I wish too :-) I enjoyed both games unspoiled but unfortunately can do so only once.I just hope Ubisoft gets a lot of good feedback on this which will lead to more unexpected plot twists and better story telling in general. With all the leaks and trickled down information on the story I get the sense that the dev's don't value their own stories very much. Otherwise there might be more effort in keeping those things secret - it can be done just as shown here.

All this effort from Ubisoft to protect the important parts of the story is great, and certainly like others try and stay in the dark about game stories.

However, this plot twist was spoiled for me by Ubisoft themselves: Reading Ziio's database entry as soon as it becomes available reveals Haytham's true allegiances long before his sequence is finished. Shame.

I thought it was kind of an interesting twist. I just figured Haytham was Connor's father (half British, half Indian) - so I wasn't surprised when the Indian chick showed up. I wondered how they'd make the leap from Haytham to Connor.

I'm more disappointed in the overall game. I felt like, even though combat had become fairly routine and non-challenging, Revelations was a pretty well crafted game without a lot of problem areas.

AC3 is constantly frustrating me. Combat is much much more difficult, it seems like they're trying to make it more "challenging" - but instead it just ends up being more difficult. Things aren't explained well --- "select your assassin" - wait, I have an assassin? (besides myself) - oh, it's the french cook dude with the cleaver.

You get many more of those moments that you used to see in the earlier games where you'd be running along a beam - and instead of leaping across - you just leap out into open space.

As far as I can tell - there's no hay piles underneath the eagle synchronization trees - but there are for city buildings. So, the first time you leap out of a tree - expecting to fall into a hay pile - you fall to the ground and die.

Apparently - they had much cooler weapons in renaissance era than they did in colonial America - even though it's 400 years later. Muskets appear to be single shot - even though it tells you that you have ammo and can reload.

I'm seriously wondering if anybody besides developers beta tested this thing - because it breaks a whole lot of conventions established in the first 4 games.

Some parts are fun (like the sailing ship - so far) - but so many other parts are just plain frustrating.

It didn't surprise me all that much (even the Templar reveal; something like that was heavily foreshadowed in Revelations). What did surprise me is that Ubi squandered an opportunity to have a female protagonist.

What I would like to have spoilered is how Ubi is doing these leaderboards.

Perhaps Liberations doesn't count as an Assassin's Creed title with a female protagonist?

I don't own a Vita. I probably never will. But you can qualify my statement as "in a major game release."

There's one place Ubisoft wasn't careful enough and ended up spoiling the surprise for me.

If you're like me, and you read the lore as soon as it's unlocked, the entry on Connor's mom does mention that she was kept from becoming Clan Mother because of her relationship with a known Templar. This was unlocked before the reveal.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.